Author: simon

AudioBooks – December 2019

Call the Ambulance! by Les Pringle

Stories from a British Ambulance driver in the late-1970s and 1980s. A good range of stories from the funny to the tragic. 7/10

Permanent Record by Edward Snowden

An autobiography by the NSA Whistle-blower. Mostly a recounting of his life, career and circumstances that led up to him leaking. Interesting. 7/10

Life in the Middle Ages by Richard Winston

As the titles describes. Unusually for English Language books it focuses on France. Not much history just daily life & only 5h long. Probably works better with pictures. 6/10

Dr Space Junk vs the Universe: Archaeology and the Future by Alice Gorman

A Mix of topics. Some autobiography & how she worked her way into the archeology of spaceflight. Plus items of Space History & comparisons with earth archeology. But it works 8/10

Little House in the Big Woods by Laura Ingalls Wilder

Only 3h 40m long and roughly covering a year. The author describes her life (aged 5-6) and her family in a cabin Wisconsin in the early 1870s. 1st in the series. 7/10

Abraham Lincoln: A Life (Volume One) by Michael Burlingame

50h and covers up to his 1st inauguration. Not a good 1st Lincoln bio to read but very good. Some repetition as multiple sources a quoted on some points. 7/10

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Donations 2019

Each year I do the majority of my Charity donations in early December (just after my birthday) spread over a few days (so as not to get my credit card suspended). I’m a little late this year due to a new credit card and other stuff distracting me.

I also blog about it to hopefully inspire others. See: 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015

All amounts this year are in $US unless otherwise stated

My main donations was to Givewell (to allocate to projects as they prioritize). Once again I’m happy that Givewell make efficient use of money donated.

I donated $50 each to groups providing infrastructure and advocacy. Wikipedia only got $NZ 50 since they converted to my local currency and I didn’t notice until afterwards

Some Software Projects. Software in the Public Interest provides admin support for many Open Source projects. Mozilla does the Firefox Browser and other stuff. Syncthing is an Open Source Project that works like Dropbox

Finally I’m still listening to Corey Olsen’s Exploring the Lord of the Rings series (3 years in and about 20% of the way though) plus his other material

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Audiobooks – November 2019

Exactly: How Precision Engineers Created the Modern World by Simon Winchester

Starting from the early 18th century each chapter covers increasing greater accuracy and the technology that needed and used it. Nice read 8/10

The Secret Cyclist: Real Life as a Rider in the Professional Peloton by The Secret Cyclist

An okay read although I don’t follow the sport so had never heard of most of the names. It is still readable however and gives a good feel for the world. 6/10

Braving It: A Father, a Daughter, and an Unforgettable Journey into the Alaskan Wild by James Campbell

A father takes his 15 year-old daughter for two trips to a remote cabin and a 3rd trip hiking/canoeing along a remote river in Alaska. Well written and interesting. 8/10

The Left Behind: Decline and Rage in Rural America by Robert Wuthnow

Based on Interviews with small town Americans it talks about their lives and frustrations with Washington which they see as distant but interfering. 7/10

World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War by Max Brookes

This was the “almost” full text version. Lots of different actors reading each chapter (which are arranged as interviews). Great story and presentation works well. 9/10

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Audiobooks – October 2019

The Story of the British Isles in 100 Places by Neil Oliver

Covers what you’d expect with a good attempt not just to hit the “history 101” places. Author has an accent that takes a while to get used to. 7/10

Death’s End – Cixin Liu

3rd in Trilogy wrapping things mostly up. Just a few characters so easy to keep track of them. If you liked the previous books you’ll like this one. 7/10

Building the Cycling City: The Dutch Blueprint for Urban Vitality by Melissa & Chris Bruntlett

Talking about Dutch Cycling culture. Compares 5 different cities (some car orientated) and how they differ in their cycling journey. 7/10

Scrappy Little Nobody by Anna Kendrick

A general memoir by the actress. A bit disjointed & unsystematic and by no means a tell-all. A few good stories sprinkled in. 6/10

The $100 Startup by Chris Guillebeau

Lots of case studies of businesses built off relatively little capital (and usually staying small). Plenty of good advice although lists don’t translate well in audio. 7/10

Atomic Adventures: Secret Islands, Forgotten N-Rays, and Isotopic Murder-A Journey into the Wild World of Nuclear Science by James Magaffey

A bunch of really good stories from the Atomic age (not just the usual ones) including a view from inside of the Cold Fusion fiasco. 8/10

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Audiobooks – September 2019

Off the Rails: A Train Trip Through Life by Beppe Severgnini

A collection of train journey articles (written over about 20 years). A good selection on interesting and amusing. 7/10

Exoplanets: Hidden Worlds and the Quest for Extraterrestrial Life by Donald Goldsmith

A history of the discovery of exoplanets, covering the different groups, techniques and rivalries. Good although I got the people mixed up sometimes. 7/10

Save the Cat! : The Last Book on Screenwriting You’ll Ever Need by Blake Snyder

A guide to screenwriting with a few stories and observations on movies thrown in. Good even if you are just reading it for fun. 7/10

Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End by Atul Gawande

A book about geriatric and end-of-life care and choices. Lots of points about how risking all for aggressive treatment is often a very bad idea. Thought-provoking. 9/10

Ancient Alexandria: The History and Legacy of Egypt’s Most Famous City by Charles River Editors

Just a two hour long overview of the history. Covered the basic stuff and maybe worth skimming before you hit something meatier. 6/10

Vulcan 607 by Rowland White

The story of the long-distant bombing raids during the Falkland’s war. Lots of details on the history of the Vulcan, the crews, background and the actual missions. 9/10

101 Secrets For Your Twenties by Paul Angone

I really can’t remember this book well. I think it was okay but serves me right for getting months behind on reviews. On list for completeness. ?/10

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Audiobooks – August 2019

Periodic Tales: The Curious Lives of the Elements by Hugh Aldersey-Williams

Various depths of coverage (usually by interest of the story) of the discovery, usage and literature/cultural impact around each of the elements. 8/10

Born to Run by Bruce Springsteen

Autobiography read by the author. Covers his whole career and personal life. Well written and lots of details and insight. Well read too. 9/10

The Admirals: Nimitz, Halsey, Leahy, and King – The Five-Star Admirals Who Won the War at Sea by Walter R. Borneman

A Biography of the 5 Admirals and the interactions of their careers before and during World War 2. 7/10

Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language by Gretchen McCulloch

I really can’t remember this book (serves me right for delaying reviews). I think it was okay though. [67]/10

The 4% Universe: Dark Matter, Dark Energy, and the Race to Discover the Rest of Reality by Richard Panek

Pretty much what the subtitles says. Worked fairly well at keep the different people distinct and technical explanations made sense. 7/10

The Unopened casebook of Sherlock Holmes written by John Taylor with Simon Callow as Sherlock Holmes and Nicky Henson as Dr Watson

6 audioplay stories. Quality is okay although I detected a theme with the villains. 7/10

Best. Movie. Year. Ever: How 1999 Blew Up the Big Screen by Brian Raftery

A run though of the great (and a few not) movies that came out in 1999. Some backstories on many with industry and world news from the year. 8/10


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DevOpsDays NZ 2019 – Day 2 – Session 3

Everett Toews – Is GitOps worthy of the [BuzzWord]Ops moniker?

  • Usual Git workflow
  • But it takes some action
  • Applying desired state from Git
  • Example: Infrastructure as code
    • DNS
    • Onboarding and offboarding
  • Git is now a SPOF
  • Change Management Dept is now a barrier
  • Integrate with ITSM
  • Benefits: Self-service, Compiience

Joel Wirāmu Pauling – Why Bare Metal still maters

  • Cloud Native Dev doesn’t exist as a closer system
  • IoT is all hardware
  • AI/ML is using special hardware
  • Networks is all hardware offloads
  • FPGAs and ASICS need more standard open way to access
  • You’ll always have weird stuffs on your network
  • Virtualization has abstracted away the real
  • We care able vendor lockin with cloud APIs and Aus electricity isn’t all that green

Steven Ensslen – Do you have a data quality problem?

  • What is data ops and why do we want it?
  • People think they have a data quality problem but they don’t actually measure it to see how bad.
  • Causes all sorts of problems.
  • 3 Easy steps to fix data quaility
  • 1 – Document data charactersistics and train people to know them
  • 2 – Monitor data as if it is infrastructure
    • Test data like it is code
  • 3 – Professionalize your support of data professionals
    • Bring in the spreadsheet experts
    • Support reporting and analytics people too

Mandi Buswell – What are Kubernetes Operators and Why do I care

  • Like an App Store on your kubernetes cluster
  • Like a like Kubernetes robot doing that hard work for you. Lifecycle management
  • Operators run as microservices on the kubernetes cluster
  • operatorhub.io
  • Work on any kubernetes cluster
  • You can even write your own

Laura Bell – Securing the systems of the future

  • Fear and Lothing
    • It is an old problem because “People are Jerks”
  • All organization try either Fight, Flight, Freeze
  • Trying to protect: Confidentiality, Integrity, Availbality
  • Protect, Detect, Respond
  • Monolith
    • A big wall around
    • Layered defense is better but not the final solution
    • Defensive software architecture is not just prevention
    • Castles had lots of layers of defenses. Some prevention, Some Detection, Some response
  • MIcroservices
    • Look at something in the middle of a star and erase it
    • Push malicious code into deployment pipelines
  • Avoid scar tissue, stuff put in just to avoid specific previous problems. Make you feel safe but without any real evidence.
  • Fearless security patterns and approaches
  • Technology is changing but the basics are still the same
  • Lots of techniques in computer security.
  • Prevention and Detection are interchangeable
  • Batman vs Meercat model
  • Be Aware and challenge your own bubble
  • Supply Chains are vulnerable: Integrations, dependencies, Data Sources
  • Determinate threat vs Dynamic Threat
    • Can’t predicts which steps in which order are going to get the result
    • Comprimise the data then the engine will return bad results
  • Plug for opensecurity.nz

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DevOpsDays NZ 2019 – Day 2 – Session 2

Jacob Ivester – Diagnose DevOps: The work behind the work

  • Unhappy DevOps Family
    • Unsupport Software
    • Releases outside of primetime
    • etc
  • Focus on Process as a common problem
    • Manage Change that Affects Multiple teams
    • Throughputs vs Outputs
  • Repeatability
  • Extensibility
  • Visability
  • Safety

Cameron Huysmans – Designing an Enterprise Secrets Management Service using HashiCorp Vault

  • Australian based Bank
  • Transition for last 30 years for a bank to a layered based security model (all the way down to the server in the datacentre)
  • In 2017 moved to the cloud and infrastructure in the cloud
  • What makes a bank – licensed to operate
    • Must demonstrate control of the process
    • Reports problems to regulator
    • Identifyable business Processes
    • All Humans
  • If you use a pipeline there are no humans in the process. These machine process needs to conform to the same control
    • Archetecture naturally resistent to change. Change requires a complex process
    • ITIL
    • 2FA required for everything
    • Secrets everywhere
  • Disruption
    • Dynamic Systems with constant updates
    • Immutable containers
    • Changes done via code
    • Live system changes
    • Code and automation drives things
    • Dynamic CMDB – High Levels of abstraction
    • But you still have a secrets problems
  • Secrets Management
    • Not just a place to store passwords
    • But also a Chain of Trust
  • If Pipelines make the change who owns it, who audits it?
  • Vault becomes a bit of audit by saying who used something (person or process)
  • Why another tool ?
  • Created a pattered on how thing will be deployed. Got Security to okay it. Build it in a pipeline
  • Vault placed in the highest security area
    • But less-secure areas needed to talk to it.
    • Lots of zones internally. Some in Cloud, DMZ
    • Some talk via API gateway to main vault
    • Had a Vault replica that had a copy of some secrets and could be used by those zones that were not allowed to to the secrets zone
  • Learnings
    • This is hard, especially in the cloud
    • If Pipelines are doing the change, that must be kept secure. Attribution, notification and real-time analytics
    • Declarative manifests of change (code, scripts, tools) require more strict access controls
    • Avoid direct point-to-point connections

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DevOpsDays NZ 2019 – Day 2 – Session 1

Cath Jones – The Myth of the Senior Engineer

  • They won’t be able to hit the ground running on Day 1
    • Assume they know everything about how things work at your organisation that is organisation or industry-specific
    • If you don’t account for this you will see problems, stress, high turnover
  • Example: Trail by Fire
    • You get shown the basic stuff and then given your first ticket
  • How do you take organisation knowledge and empower people?
  • Employee Socialisation
    • Helps mitigate problems and assumptions
    • Facilitates communication and networking
    • Allows people to begin contributing sooner
  • Pre-Arrival Stage
    • Let people know what is expected
    • Let existing people kno who is thating and our expectations for them
    • Example: Automatic (wordpress)
      • Asked people in the final stages to complete some (paid) work.
      • Candiatites get better understanding of the company
  • Preparing for Transition
    • Culture-shock
    • How are you like compared to where they came from?
    • The new role compared to their previous one?
    • Come from a place where they were an expert and had lots of domain-specific knowledge to being a newbie
  • The Encounter Stage
    • Mentoring, Communication, Technical onboarding
    • Example: Cohorts of new hires
    • Mentoring: Proven way to socialise Senior engineers. Can be Labour intensive but helps when documentation lacking
    • Share Mentor-ship responsibilities: eg Technical and Organisational mentor seperate
    • Communication: Expectations that company places, how privledged and how transparent?
    • Authenticity: Can people be themselves. Reduces stress
  • Technical onboarding: Needs to take time and do it properly. Allow new people to contribute back to it and make it better.
    • Pick out easy wins or low-hanging fruit so peopel can contribute sooner
    • Have Style Guides and good docs
  • MetaMorphosis
    • Senior Engineers are fully Contributing

Katie McLaughlin – Being kind to 3am you

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DevOpsDays NZ 2019 – Day 1 – Session 3

Gleidson Nascimento – Packaging OpenShift Origin Kubernetes Distribution (OKD)

  • Centos SIG
  • Based on latest upstream

Joshua King – Don’t Reinvent the Wheel, Just Realign It

  • Project: Let notifications work for powershell users
  • Then he found the UWP community toolkit
  • Which had notifications built-in
  • These days looks around first, asks for APIs rather than scraping
  • Look around for open-source tools and give back
  • Sometimes your implimentation might be fun or even better than the original

Srdan Dukic – Implicit trust agreement in Learning Organizations

  • Sysadmin shell -> ansible -> APIs -> automate everything
  • Programmers coded themselves out of a job
  • Followup instructions or achieve results?
  • A bit of both – tension between the two
  • Money today or Money tomorrow?
  • Employee – Expected to make things better
  • Employer – Support things getting better, not fire people when they automate themselves out of a job

Julie Gunderson – You Can’t Buy DevOps

  • Lots of companies talking about DevOps are trying to sell you a solution
  • What doesn’t makes you a devops company
    • Be in the Cloud
    • Have a DevOps team
    • Get rid of the Ops Team
    • A checklist you can tick off
    • Easy
  • Westrum 3 Cultures Model
  • We want the generative model
  • Keeping information flowing between teams is prerequisite for high performance teams
  • Psychological Safety to make decisions. Lets employees focus on problems and getting work done rather than politics
  • Practices
    • Configuration management
    • CICD Pipelines
    • Work in small batches
    • Test every commit and everything else (look at Chaos engineering)
  • Tools
    • Let the teams who are using the tools decide on what tools they will use
    • XebiaLabs Periodic table of DevOps tools
  • Getting there
    • Start with one team and a POC
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